Bug#844572: uncertainties: FTBFS randomly (FAIL: Full comparison to a Monte-Carlo calculation)

[Santiago Vila]

severity 844572 important
thanks

Hello.

I'm setting the severity of this bug to "important" not because
I don't think it is not RC (as Release Policy still says that
packages must autobuild *without* failure), but because the
Release Managers are considering to decide about RC-ness
of this kind of bugs based on the probability of failure.

We don't know what kind of threshold there will be for stretch, so I
strongly recommend that you act as if this bug was serious and RC,
especially if the failures happen very often on any kind of
autobuilder which is not misconfigured.

Unfortunately this package was already autoremoved because of this bug.

This is probably not ok if we consider that other packages which FTBFS
a lot more often are still in stretch. I'm going to ask Release
Managers if it's possible to reallow this in stretch.

Thanks.

Bug#844572: uncertainties: FTBFS randomly (FAIL: Full comparison to a Monte-Carlo calculation)

[Santiago Vila]

Package: src:uncertainties
Version: 2.4.4-1
Severity: serious

Dear maintainer:

I tried to build this package in stretch with "dpkg-buildpackage -A"
(which is what the "Arch: all" autobuilder would do to build it)
but it failed:


[...]
==
FAIL: Full comparison to a Monte-Carlo calculation.
--
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/nose/case.py", line 197, in runTest
self.test(*self.arg)
  File "/<>/uncertainties/test_umath.py", line 177, in 
test_monte_carlo_comparison
% (covariances_samples, covariances_this_module)
AssertionError: The covariance matrices do not coincide between the Monte-Carlo 
simulation and the direct calculation:
* Monte-Carlo:
[[  9.99611355e-05   1.34661091e-08   3.20307739e-04]
 [  1.34661091e-08   9.95636755e-07  -3.20894019e-05]
 [  3.20307739e-04  -3.20894019e-05   2.16969297e-03]]
* Direct calculation:
[[  1.e-04   0.e+00   3.17312046e-04]
 [  0.e+00   1.e-06  -3.37427446e-05]
 [  3.17312046e-04  -3.37427446e-05   2.14544216e-03]]

--
Ran 54 tests in 2.074s

FAILED (failures=1)
E: pybuild pybuild:276: test: plugin custom failed with: exit code=1: cd 
uncertainties; nosetests
dh_auto_test: pybuild --test --test-nose -i python{version} -p 2.7 returned 
exit code 13
debian/rules:21: recipe for target 'override_dh_auto_test' failed
make[1]: *** [override_dh_auto_test] Error 25
make[1]: Leaving directory '/<>'
debian/rules:7: recipe for target 'build-indep' failed
make: *** [build-indep] Error 2
dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules build-indep gave error exit status 2


This happens randomly. Sometimes it fails. Sometimes it does not.
But it's easy to trigger if the build is attempted enough times.

I attach three build logs in which this test failed.

Thanks.

uncertainties_2.4.4-1_amd64-20161107T023353Z.gz
Description: application/gzip


uncertainties_2.4.4-1_amd64-20161117T000107Z.gz
Description: application/gzip


uncertainties_2.4.4-1_amd64-20161117T000521Z.gz
Description: application/gzip